On February 8, 1996, the regulation of the electronic mass media and telecommunications took an unparalleled turn that is destined to change the entire regulatory
scheme -- from ownership to technology. When President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 into law that day, he did so with an electronic pen at the Library of Congress, symbolizing the beginning of a new era. The Act signaled the
end of a decades-long policy of segregating electronic technologies to shield them from
competition with each other; it also signaled the dawn of a new policy that allowed
them to compete and even encouraged media mergers that would not have even been
considered in the past. Prior to the Act, cable companies were not permitted to intrude
into the telephone business and strict limits were imposed on the ownership of
broadcast stations out of fear that a few companies would dominate the market. Cable
and telephone firms can now effectively nuke it out in the marketplace; although
there are still a few limits on broadcast ownership, the restrictions have been considerably liberalized. To appreciate the significance of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, we must first understand how we arrived where we are today. Let us begin
with a brief history of broadcasting.

THE ORIGINS OF BROADCASTING

Although much of the electronic media is privately owned, the broadcast spectrum is
considered a public resource or, more specifically, a limited public resource. The
technical capacity exists for an almost unlimited number of channels, as they are
traditionally known. Yet the courts and the federal government -- most notably the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) -- still cling to a scarcity rationale in
justifying restraints on electronic media that would never pass constitutional muster
for the print media. There is no better illustration of this than the U.S. Supreme Court
decision in Turner Broadcasting v. FCC ( 1997),
1 in which the Court ruled that Sections
4 and 5 of the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992

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